HIGHER INDOCTRINATION: Universities and Corporate control by David Livingstone

Introduction

Universities are viewed as institutions independent of the concerns of the rest of society, where free inquiry, for the sake of knowledge itself, is encouraged. However, an examination of the developments that took place in the North American university system over the last century or so, will reveal a situation significantly different from the one that has been presumed to exist. A dramatic restructuring had been undertaken, between 1894 to 1929, that permanently placed policy making decisions over education in the hands of an industrial minority. Unbeknownst to the public at large, their very positions of power placed them in a direct conflict of interest with the generally accepted aims of higher education.

Although Marx’s solution for the ills of capitalism have turned out to be a political disaster, his critique of capitalism, nevertheless, was quite apt. Our understanding of capitalism is a society that practices a policy of free-enterprise. In actuality, the situation is closer to what Marx had described. He defined a capitalist state as one in which the “owners of the means of production”, that is, the industrial class, or the major corporations, manipulate the industry, the government, the media, and the educational system, towards their own personal ends, and at the expense of the masses, or who he would have called the “proletariat”.

Marx predicted that, in the advanced stages of capitalism, universities would become “factories of mental production”. What he meant was, that universities would become tools of the state-apparatus, guided by commercial interests, to first, coordinate necessary research projects, and second, to exercise control over the population, through the formulation of a national ideology designed to foster adherence and dedication to the capitalist agenda.

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I would very much like to read what all you students of "higher indoctrination" think about this article!

__________________Three things are sacred to me: first Truth, and then, in its tracks, primordial prayer; Then virtue–nobility of soul which, in God walks on the path of beauty. Frithjof Schuon